Technology Preview of Qt 4.8 now available for testing and feedback.

I am very happy to announce the release of a Technology Preview of Qt 4.8 to the community for testing and feedback.

Qt 4.8 will be a release containing a lot of quality and performance improvements that were carried out during the last 12 months, such as File System performance improvements. It also includes the Qt Platform Abstraction (Lighthouse) feature, which enables easier porting of Qt into new graphics systems for third parties. Today’s Technology Preview is released to get your feedback, comments and improvement ideas.

@Srikanth: QtScriptedStateMachine lives happily in http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-labs/scxml, and with a better name than the odd one I chose for it originally.
Since Qt is moving to a modularized approach anyway, I believe QScxml will keep living in its humble abode as a separate and hopefully useful project.

Thanks for the comments. We are working with full speed to provide beta release in the next few weeks thus no binaries for TP available (no change into normal practise). We hope that we get some feedback for beta from you in the next weeks.

Still “work in progress”, but I suspect the necessary changes should already be in 4.8.

As I understand the scope has been extended such that the “Qt generated settings” are now stored in “application private setting files/locations” (and not globally under some Trolltech key in the registry, or under ~/Settings/com.trolltech.qt (?) or the like – I believe it was mostly the later file which caused Qt apps to be rejected. To my understanding all other issues could be worked around in “application code”) – not only on Mac (should be finished), but also on other platforms (desired behaviour switchable via some setting, off course). And apparently THAT is still work in progress.

@JubiluM: Anything not on the maturity list is considered Active and Maintained.

@susi: No Qt3D is not part of Qt 4.8.

@Wladimir: The module is still there. It’s just that Nokia has no current plans on developing it further or fixing bugs that exist in it. The module only supports the SVG 1.2 Tiny module and we don’t see a large benefit to improving this given that WebKit contains a much more feature complete and optimized SVG renderer that is still actively developed.

Any chance of get the precompiled QtDemo back again? there was a great start point to search for samples and look how they work. The new SDK framework and installer it’s great to select if you want to download the demos or not.

That page (and it’s links) continue to offer nothing more substantial. In this blog post, however, I read “Beta in a few weeks”. I will need to introduce some new functions and data structures in order to solve 3 (or perhaps 4) of KDE’s top-20 “all-time MOST VOTED BUGS”. How long have I got?

Hopefully you are going to fix the existing Mac issues. For example, the notorious com.trolltech.plist issue prevents us from submitting any of our applications to Mac App Store which is more than frustrating. I recommend once again that you focus on fixing existing issues before making any new releases.

@Rick Stockton: Beta packaging & testing is already under work and content is frozen. Documentation should be quite final for the release candidate. And RC schedule after Beta depends on the feedback we get from the Beta and on the Qt4.8 quality in general.

@mariu: Yes. I am personally already using Qt4.7 with my Win7 64-bit laptop. Do you have any specific concerns regarding Qt4.8 and Win 7 64-bit ?